Old Home New Home, part 2

What I think is weird is how you live in a place and you feel at home, and you sort of start to stagnate, and what you once upon a time thought you’d “fix” or “change” just never happened, your home is now your little fortified castle where things are ever so slightly but continually in disarray, but it’s your mess so it doesn’t matter, but still you wished you would have had time to fix or change things and make it a bit nicer.

But then when you decide to leave there’s suddenly this surge; you want to move on, you plan and you do and you make, onwards and upwards! You plan for every eventuality, everything has to click, and even though you’re pretty sure everything will work out just fine, you still don’t dare to hope, you don’t want to jinx it, just in case.

So I haven’t talked much about the whole process. I didn’t want to jinx it. We did an incredible amount of work in just 10 days, because that’s what we had before we were going on the two-week vacation we had planned a while ago. A longer while than the actual moving plans, strangely enough. We realised, a couple of weeks before our holiday, that we had to get the timing right, and so we rolled up our sleeves and went at it.

Once you fix things and sort stuff out, this little home suddenly looks pretty great. And you remind yourself that this was your place, your little fortified panic room, and in the afterglow of it all you sort of don’t want to leave it. I don’t know how many times I said “I’ve wanted to get this fixed for YEARS”, or “Why didn’t I do this ages ago?”.

We got it done in time for the photo shoot for the add, and then we left for England and Italy for two days later. It was a strange contrast; two weeks of slaving away verses two weeks of utter escapism and leisure. Of course it was also a bit of an anticlimax, getting everything ready for a sale and then… just… wait. I just wanted everything to be over and done with. And I was really worried no one would want to buy my apartment, my home, my fort, you know, the place I love. In an odd sort of way it would make me feel oddly rejected. But the photos for the add turned out pretty well, I think:

Of course, in the end someone bought it. We got home from our vacation, the estate agent arranged for two viewings, people came, people bid, and it all went far better than expected. When I went to sign the papers, meeting my buyers for the first time, they turned out to be a very cute, artistic looking young couple with a 2 year old boy. I was happy, they were happy (especially the boy, who got a cookie at the estate agent’s office), and all the things I’ve loved about my home they expressed an appreciation and very prominent enthusiasm for as well. Which made me feel good, like I wasn’t abandoning my apartment, but rather turning it over to someone else who will care for it and love it.